I was curious about this and searched for details. Sweet Raptor Jesus the wingnuts are all over this! The story you link to is by Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, and it has no links anywhere outside itself. The reporter seems to have a hardon for AG Holder and the "Fast and Furious" arms-to-Mexican-drug-gangs fiasco.

Searching for "Jesus E. Diaz Jr." on Goggle I got 12 pages--and counting--of rightwing blogs and "news services" and a few spiderbot-driven news aggregators before giving up. The DOJ's national web page doesn't have anything except the Dept of Justice announcing the original indictment in *2009*.

The story could be true as written, but so far it looks like outrage bait or medication for rightwingers whose blood pressure is too low.

At work, in the DOJ BOP intranet, we have this daily info dump called news clips that collects prison and related law enforcemt news from all over the country. That's where I was originally made aware of the news article. Ugh. I'd hate to think I'm perpetuating wingnut conspiracy bs.

Now that you're all terrified that the police will at a moment's notice come to brutalize you in your sleep and throw tear gas at your children, come back and protest! Your rights haven't been marginalized and trampled, your human moral standing has been degraded, and your livelihood hasn't been threatened by the government that's supposed to be your advocate against the people that you are protesting. NO BIG DEAL.

For the past several years, while the mainstream media was dutifully reporting on all things Kardashian or (more recently) a wholly manufactured debt-ceiling crisis, ordinary people were losing their health care, their homes, their jobs, and their savings. Those people have taken that narrative to Facebook and Twitter—just as citizens took to those alternative forms of media throughout the Middle East as part of the Arab Spring. And just to be clear: They aren’t holding up signs that say “I want Bill O’Reilly’s stuff.” They aren’t holding up signs that say “I am animated by toxic levels of envy and entitlement.” They are holding up signs that are perfectly and intrinsically clear: They want accountability for the banks that took their money, they want to end corporate control of government. They want their jobs back. They would like to feed their children. They want—wait, no, we want—to be heard by a media that has devoted four mind-numbing years to channeling and interpreting every word uttered by a member of the Palin family while ignoring the voices of everyone else.

I'm still uncertain when, how, and even if, Occupy Oakland turned violent. The cops and mayor keep talking like they were forming a militia, but I haven't seen anything that says they were even moving from their encampment until the police forced them to move.

Unfortunately the Bay Area PD's are fairly well known for disproportionate response. It seems entirely likely that it was a case of them ordering the Occupiers to clear out in an hour, and then started dropping tear gas as soon as the hour was up. And that's kind of the impression I got from the quotes in the article.

Here's the full video of Scott Olsen being hit. It shows him before, just standing there calmly at attention. People seemed pretty peaceful, and I'm impressed someone had the balls to throw one of the tear gas canisters back. http://vimeo.com/31187119

RandomEntity: Throwing the tear gas can back is actually the best plan from a damage standpoint. Sure, you're personally gonna get fucked up, but you'll be lessening the propagation in the rest of the crowd, and the cops are already equipped to handle gas (usually). While it's probably going to be construed as an act of violence itself, and grounds for escalation on the scene, things are already fucked if they're shooting tear gas at you. You could theoretically claim self-defense if they even catch you for it. (I AM NOT A LAWYER.)

It's a pretty common thing in "protest handbooks".

edit: @AlanTyson - The current boilerplate answer is that the occupation was having issues with sanitation and assault and were not allowing emergency personnel into the group. How true that is is up for debate, but that's the answer they're going with right now.

"When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil shit Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money."

A while ago now, there were these people out in Greece called Spartans. They made slaves out of the people they conquered and treated them horribly. It took, if I remember correctly, the labours of some 200 Helots (slaves) to support one Spartan.

How many of us does it take to support one banker? One company director? One billionaire?

The London protestors have been told they can stay, but they have to get rid of all the tents and equipment as it falls foul of laws to do with 'use of the highway'. I suspect the reason it's taken this long to serve is because they've had to spend a while digging through the ancient lawbooks to find something they can use that doesn't require any change to the law.